Learning Along The Way: Further Reflections on Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy by Patrick Casement London:  Routledge, published January 2019

I clearly remember being taken over the hill many years ago, from Highgate to Hampstead, to hear and watch Patrick Casement giving supervision. It set me on a path of therapy and therapy training. When I read On Learning From The Patient (Casement, 1985) the penny began to drop. One went on learning as a therapist discretely, through one's reading and study, but also interactively, in the moment, wondering, questioning, and finding out more.

The client-therapist joint endeavour theme is central to all of Casement's books: for me this is what makes them so immediately accessible. Learning Along The Way is a rich, but always digestible, gourmet feast of experiences, from which novices and the most experienced can learn. It illustrates the need for the analyst to experience the distress of the client in addition to “eventually also being able to understand where this comes from and why,” but that “too much interpretation too quickly … is often experienced by the patient as the analyst being unwilling, perhaps being unable, to bear the intensity of the patient's feelings” (p 7).

There are valuable thoughts on fostering the supervisee's use of internal dialogue and “trial identity”; considering from the patient's point of view how they might experience what the therapist is saying. Included too, is an entire chapter on Casement's own theoretical contributions, and again, the emphasis is on questioning. He quotes Karl Popper (coincidentally, an old friend of my own father), who cautions:

If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from and not see whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories.

Casement examines psychoanalytic training, the importance of the open mind, and includes a chapter on the analytic process which I found particularly helpful. In a chapter on self-revelation Casement cautions against the analyst's personality impinging upon the (analytic) process but states, nevertheless,